Decoding The Starr Report

Buried in the deliberate chaos of the Starr report, the author contends, are stories the independent counsel doesn’t want told: the abuse of his power—including the trap that snared Monica Lewinsky—and the prior relations of his own office, at least as early as 1994, with Linda Tripp.

The six-volume report by Kenneth W. Starr to the United States House of Representatives—which consists, so far, of the single-volume “Referral” and five volumes of “Appendices and Supplemental Materials”—is, in many ways, an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt. What it is textually is a voluminous work of demented pornography, with many fascinating characters and several largely hidden story lines. What it is politically is an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure.

Less obvious at first, and then altogether unmistakable, is the authors’ scorn for the House of Representatives. The power to prosecute an impeachment is the only important power that the Constitution grants solely to the House. Before the “Communication from the Office of the Independent Counsel, Kenneth W. Starr,” as the document is called, it was unthinkable that any official, of any branch of government, would presume to set forth, in a document submitted to the House, in the course of an impeachment inquiry, such conclusions as the president “lied,” or “attempted to obstruct justice,” or any of the other judgments that the report presumes to make on the very first page of its introduction—let alone include on its cover and as part of its title the name of its primary author. On the cover of this document the name of Henry J. Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, does not appear. The words “United States House of Representatives” appear in letters about half the size of “Kenneth W. Starr.”

From the moment Chairman Hyde permitted Mr. Starr thus to interpose his views between the committee and the evidence and authorized the publication of these documents under the congressional seal, he set in motion an unprecedented process in which the House is nearly powerless. On October 9, 1998, the chairman said he would permit his committee to call Mr. Starr, but that he saw “no need” to call, for example, Monica Lewinsky; other members of the panel said they could rely, for the testimony of witnesses, on Mr. Starr’s report. Apart from the obvious implications of a proceeding in which the judge’s major witness is the prosecutor—and other witnesses are neither cross-examined nor even called—this decision limits the power of the House to approving or disapproving the recommendations of the independent counsel. For the purposes of impeachment, the independent counsel has become the House.

There are signs that the document was never intended to be understood, or even read, by anyone. The absence of dates, tables of contents, index, chronology, context, accurate headings, and logic of any sort from the five supplementary volumes is almost the least of it. So are the distortions and misrepresentations in the report itself of what the record actually shows. Documents published by the Government Printing Office are often a marvel of information and legibility, printed with great speed and under pressure. In the 7,793 pages that constitute just the “Appendices and Supplemental Materials,” however, there are embedded thousands of smaller pages (sometimes four, often six tiny pages, compressed within a single larger page) in type so minuscule that, quite apart from the time constraints on reporters and other citizens, visual constraints—the eyesight, for example, of aging congressmen—absolutely preclude the reading of vast portions of the text.

There are also countless redactions, blackings-out, excisions by the House Judiciary Committee which add to the general disorder. The dates of birth of all but a few witnesses, for example, are blacked out—an attempt, presumably, to spare these witnesses (whose privacy is not just violated but mocked in these documents by the prosecutors’ constant assurances that their testimony is “secret,” and that “there are no unauthorized persons present”) the embarrassment of having their ages widely known. Other deletions are inexplicable. Names are blacked out in one place only to appear, in precisely the same context, in another. Relatively mild and perfectly obvious four-letter words are blacked out while other words, traditionally regarded as stronger and more offensive, are left in. (Variants of the word “shit,” for example, are deleted, but Linda Tripp’s remark to Monica Lewinsky “You never, ever realized whose dick you were sucking” is unedited.) There are printed invitations to parties, accompanied by the guest lists; the names of the hosts, on the invitations, are blacked out. These might be mere examples of work done innocently or in haste. It soon becomes clear, however, that a fundamental strategy of the authors is unintelligibility.

To submit a massive document in which it is literally impossible to find information by title, date, alphabetical or chronological sequence, or context of any kind makes it difficult to check whether any particular conclusion is warranted—whether there is evidence for the opposite conclusion, or another conclusion altogether. As a series of anecdotes, of prurient gossip raised, for the first time, to the level of constitutional crisis, the story the Office of the Independent Counsel wants to tell is by now widely known. People seem to have made up their minds about it. Underneath that story, however, scattered in almost incomprehensible pieces throughout the text, are at least two other stories, which the authors go to considerable lengths to hide.

The setting is the White House—a peculiar, almost farcically disordered place of rumor, envy, spite, betrayal, birthday parties. Everyone, from the president’s secretary, Betty Currie, through the Uniformed Secret Service guards and the stewards in the Oval Office pantry, seems to think nothing of accepting presents—ties, Godiva chocolates, pocket handkerchiefs, body lotions, gift certificates for manicures and pedicures at Georgette Klinger—from Monica Lewinsky, a young woman who is regarded, almost universally and, as it turns out, with astonishing understatement, as a “stalker,” a “hall surfer,” a “cling on,” and a “clutch.” One of the pantry stewards, Bayani Nelvis, has dinners with Ms. Lewinsky, exchanges gifts with her, offers her the president’s cigars, and, according to Ms. Lewinsky, calls her from a presidential vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to invite her to come and share a house with him. Mr. Nelvis denies the call from Martha’s Vineyard. On many other matters he is mum.

Another staff member, rumored to be a “graduate,” or former intimate of the president’s, “clomps” through the corridors wearing the president’s shoes. Young people offend older staff members by spilling Coke on White House carpets and putting their feet up on White House chairs. The Uniformed Secret Service guards at the White House feel free to spread scurrilous gossip, among themselves and to other people. On one occasion they tell Ms. Lewinsky, who is trying to enter the White House, that the president already has a female visitor in the Oval Office. Ms. Lewinsky flies into a rage—although she has not visited the president in weeks and was not invited this time. She berates Betty Currie for lying to her about the president’s where-abouts. Ms. Currie scolds the guards for their indiscretion. The guards are miffed.

In the summer of 1995, Ms. Lewinsky, who frequently describes herself as “insecure,” comes to the White House, as an unpaid intern. She repeatedly approaches the president and “introduces” herself. On November 15, 1995, Ms. Lewinsky says, she flashes her thong underwear at him, tells him she has a crush on him, and accompanies him to a secluded corridor. He asks if he may kiss her. Later that evening, when they meet again, she grabs his crotch and performs oral sex on him—an approach she tries to repeat at virtually every subsequent opportunity.

According to the testimony of Ms. Lewinsky—and she is not one to understate—there are, in all, nine incidents of these, as the report calls them, “in-person” sexual encounters: three in 1995, four in 1996, and two in 1997. In January 1996, Ms. Lewinsky says, she and the president have phone sex. He does not call her for a week. Feeling “a little bit insecure about whether he had liked it or didn’t like it” and wondering “if this was sort of developing into some kind of a longer-term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been,” she goes to the Oval Office and asks him whether this is “just about sex,” or whether he has some interest in trying to get to know her as a person. He assures her that he cherishes his time with her. On February 19, 1996, the president tells Ms. Lewinsky that their physical relationship must end. He does not feel right about it. Their friendship, however, can continue. This is not an entirely unusual thing for one person to say to another. It is not often misunderstood. Ms. Lewinsky perseveres. Wherever the president is—in the Oval Office, at staff birthday parties, jogging, attending church, at fund-raisers, departing on journeys and returning from them—Ms. Lewinsky contrives to “position” herself there. This does not go unremarked.

On April 5, 1996, the Friday before Easter, Ms. Lewinsky learns that she has been dismissed from her White House job and transferred—with a considerable rise in rank and salary—to the Pentagon. On that Sunday, which is Easter, she goes to the president to complain. He tells her that “after the election” he will be able to find her another White House job. Another young woman might have noticed, and been deterred by, the prospect of so long a separation. Not Ms. Lewinsky. She performs oral sex and departs. She renews her efforts, calling, writing, sending presents.

The president now wards off any private visits from her for nearly 11 months—from April 7, 1996, until February 28, 1997. Ms. Lewinsky hates her job at the Pentagon. She is bored by it. She has no typing skills and cannot spell. The job entails transcription. From her desk, by telephone, by E-mail, and in person, she complains. She sends cards, ties, other presents, importuning letters. She harangues Ms. Currie with incessant calls. She wants to talk to the president in person and by phone. She wants the White House job she feels she has been promised. The president and Ms. Currie say that they will try. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no White House job for her. She still manages to position herself in the president’s path. She keeps informed of his schedule through Betty Currie and Bayani Nelvis.

Finally, on February 28, 1997, she manages to visit the president again. He gives her a hatpin and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. “I wanted to perform oral sex on him,” Ms. Lewinsky testifies, “and so I did.” On every prior occasion the president has insisted that Ms. Lewinsky stop before what she tends to call completion. On this day she persuades the president to let her continue. (“It’s important to me,” she says.) Afterward, Ms. Lewinsky finds—perhaps this was always her intention—semen on her dress. On March 29, 1997, according to Ms. Lewinsky, there is a similar event. The in-person sexual encounters are at an end.

On May 24, 1997, the president calls Ms. Lewinsky in. He says again that their affair, such as it is, is over. He tells her that she is “a great person” and that they will still be friends. He is determined to be good. Ms. Lewinsky attributes the breakup to the president’s “wanting to do the right thing in God’s eyes.” Three days later, the Supreme Court announces its decision in the Paula Jones case. The suit, which accuses him of sexual harassment, can proceed while he is still in office—without “distract[ing him] from his public duties.” The decision is surely one of the worst in the Court’s history, but for now it is the law.

Ms. Lewinsky has never been reticent or soft-spoken. Now she becomes ever more wild and implacable. She phones and pages Ms. Currie at all hours, and later even visits her at home. It would not be quite accurate to say that this is just a particularly intense love story. Ms. Lewinsky has too many other interests—shopping, M&M’s, a good job (one that pays well, with a good title, and that will “intrigue” her), new men (an Australian, a “health nut,” an employee of the Pentagon, a former lover, married, with whom she resumes an affair and whom she had blackmailed some years before, by threatening to disclose the affair to his wife if he did not see her again).

Meanwhile, Ms. Lewinsky has made friends with the third major character, Linda Tripp—a colleague, who has also been transferred, under murky circumstances, from the White House to the Pentagon. Ms. Tripp says that Ms. Lewinsky did not confide in her about the “affair” until late September or early October 1996. In January 1997, Ms. Tripp begins to advise Ms. Lewinsky about strategies for getting a new White House job and also for regaining the affection of the president. She edits Ms. Lewinsky’s letters and helps her compose audiotapes to send to him.

Sometime in May or June of 1997, Ms. Tripp begins (at Ms. Lewinsky’s request, she claims) to keep a notebook of the history of Ms. Lewinsky’s encounters with the president—in order, she says, to analyze them, and look for a pattern. At approximately the same time, Ms. Lewinsky uses her computer at the Pentagon to create (at Ms. Tripp’s suggestion, she says) a “matrix,” or spreadsheet, detailing her meetings with the president. Ms. Tripp preserves her notebook. Ms. Lewinsky soon becomes as persistent with her new confidante—calling her at all hours, at home and at the office, leaving messages, interrupting meetings, visiting her at her desk several times a day—as she is with Ms. Currie or the president.

In November, Ms. Tripp testifies, she sees, for the second time, the dress in Ms. Lewinsky’s closet, the dress Ms. Lewinsky wore during her visit of February 28, 1997, to the president. Ms. Tripp is adamant in her insistence that the stain on the dress be preserved.

MS. TRIPP: Hey, listen, my cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit. . . . He said that [if a rape victim] has preserved a pinprick size of crusted semen 10 years from that time . . . they can match the DNA. . . .

MS. LEWINSKY: So why can’t I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?

MS. TRIPP: . . . [P]ack it in with your treasures. . . . It could be your only insurance policy down the road.

Tripp told the grand jury: “I wanted some way for there to be proof of what he was doing with Monica.” Of course, by the time Ms. Tripp sees the dress the president has not been “doing” anything with Monica—except trying to avoid her—for eight months.

In October 1997, Ms. Tripp, for whatever reason, begins to tape her phone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky. The prosecutors lead her through a vast amount of testimony, before the grand jury, about her own life and motives, as well as what she claims to know about Ms. Lewinsky. Fairly late in Ms. Tripp’s testimony, a juror speaks up:

THE WITNESS: Oh, the notebook—well, maybe I should say different words so it doesn’t sound contradictory at all because it wasn’t. The notebook was something Monica asked me to do in my head to understand cause and effect of all the ups and downs of her relationship in intimate detail.

None of Ms. Tripp’s subsequent explanations of why she taped make any sense. To “arm myself with a record” so that she could testify about Monica Lewinsky, truthfully, under oath in the Jones case, without fear of being defamed,she says, by the president’s lawyers or destroyed by others in the White House. She was “scared,” she says many times, but her “integrity” required her to tell the truth.

In March 1997, Michael Isikoff, a reporter from Newsweek, arrived at Ms. Tripp’s desk in the Pentagon. He told her that Kathleen Willey claimed that the president had once subjected her to sexual harassment. Mr. Isikoff said Ms. Willey had given him Ms. Tripp’s name as a confirming witness. Ms. Tripp told Mr. Isikoff she recalled the incident in question, but that Ms. Willey had actually solicited, welcomed, and subsequently boasted about the president’s embrace. In August 1997, Newsweek published Mr. Isikoff’s story—citing Ms. Tripp (against her wishes) as a source. A lot has since been said, by Ms. Tripp and in the press, about the matter. What has gradually become clear is this: Ms. Tripp tried to persuade Mr. Isikoff to write, not about Ms. Willey, but about a former White House intern, “M,” who was now working at the Pentagon. Ms. Tripp’s testimony varies about when, and by what means, she conveyed Ms. Lewinsky’s full name to Mr. Isikoff. She admits he knew it by October, the month when she began to tape.

And another chronology begins to emerge about Ms. Tripp. She describes herself to the grand jury as having once been a fairly apolitical member of the White House staff in the Bush administration,in the department of media affairs. (It was there, she says, that she first came to know Mr. Isikoff.) She stayed on until August 1994 in the Clinton White House. She believes that Mrs. Clinton became “cold” to her, perhaps as a result, Ms. Tripp says, of a mistaken idea that Ms. Tripp had a romantic interest in the president, or that the president had a romantic interest in Ms. Tripp. Ms. Tripp was transferred to the office of White House Counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum, where she was, she says, as she had always been, “loyal” and “apolitical.” She worked, she says, on “sensitive matters,” like “the appointment of the special prosecutor.”

As early as 1993, Ms. Tripp had been so appalled, however, by the Clinton White House that a friend, Tony Snow (a right-wing journalist and occasional stand-in for Rush Limbaugh), urged her to write a book and offered to put her in touch with a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg.Ms. Tripp declined.In the summer of 1996, perhaps coincidentally after Ms. Lewinsky’s first months at the Pentagon, Ms. Tripp changed her mind. She took Mr. Snow up on his offer and met with Ms. Goldberg, who suggested a ghostwriter. Ms. Tripp ultimately abandoned the project. One character whom Ms. Tripp had intended to use in her book, however, was none other than Kathleen Willey.

Ms. Tripp, it turns out, had known Kathleen Willey since 1993. As Ms. Tripp describes her, Ms. Willey was, at the time, an unpaid White House volunteer,infatuated with the president and determined to have an affair with him. According to Ms. Tripp, Ms. Willey dressed provocatively, would “position” herself in the president’s path, sent him notes, and contrived to bump into him. Ms. Tripp soon began to advise her on strategy and to help her edit cards and letters to the president. Ms. Tripp listened to Ms. Willey’s confidences and received her frequent phone calls at home. In short, not an altogether unfamiliar story. As Ms. Tripp tells it, however, she harbors at least one trace of bitterness if not of envy. “I was annoyed,” she says, because when Ms. Tripp left the White House, Ms. Willey was hired “essentially in my stead.”

There is at least one other, rather hidden, element of Ms. Tripp’s story. When she began to tape, Ms. Tripp tells the grand jurors in answer to a question, “I had never even thought about the Independent Counsel in my wildest dreams.” This is a statement that the prosecutors—if not Ms. Tripp herself—had every obligation to amplify. Because Ms. Tripp had not only thought or dreamed of the Office of the Independent Counsel, she had appeared before it at least twice before—first under Robert Fiske, and then under Kenneth W. Starr.

According to an F.B.I. report (nowhere included in Starr’s documents), Ms. Tripp appeared on April 12, 1994, at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Among her concerns was the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster. She had suspicions about that death. One source of her suspicion, reads the F.B.I. report, was Mr. Foster’s conduct when she brought him what turned out to be his last lunch, a hamburger:

He removed the onions from his hamburger, which struck Tripp as odd in retrospect. She couldn’t understand why he would do that if he was planning to commit suicide. It did not make sense to her that he might be worried about his breath if that were the case. Tripp does not know if Foster likes or dislikes onions.

Whatever her beliefs, the fact that neither Ms. Tripp in her testimony nor the prosecutors before the grand jury nor the independent counsel anywhere in his report mentions these contacts at least three years previously between Ms. Tripp and the Office of the Independent Counsel suggests that the real reason Ms. Tripp was taping, from the first, was this: the Office of the Independent Counsel asked her to.

During the year or so—November 1996 to October 1997—when Ms. Lewinsky was still haranguing, intriguing, and threatening, in her campaign to return to a White House job, Ms. Tripp had encouraged her to believe that this was a simple matter, and that failure to get such a job would appear to confirm her undeserved reputation as a stalker. She professed to be outraged on Ms. Lewinsky’s behalf that a job had not been found. Ms. Lewinsky became increasingly immoderate in her demands and her behavior. She had been “yelling” at the president, and at Ms. Currie, when she could not reach him on September 12, 1997. She had stood for an hour and a half at an entrance to the White House, “screaming.”

On October 6, 1997, Ms. Tripp changed her advice to Ms. Lewinsky. She told her friend that, according to “Kate,” a friend of Ms. Tripp’s at the National Security Council, Ms. Lewinsky would never work at the White House again, that she was, in fact, known and disliked there as a stalker, and that the best thing for her to do would be to get out of town. This had the not unpredictable effect of setting Ms. Lewinsky off on another frenzy of phone calls to the White House, this time, however, to arrange for a job in another city. Ms. Tripp suggested to Ms. Lewinsky that she ask for a job in New York. According to an F.B.I. report, Ms. Tripp said she ought also to find some way to ask for help from Vernon Jordan.

By this time, it seemed the White House was eager to get Ms. Lewinsky a job in New York, bribing her, not to be silent in any legal matter, but merely to go away. In early November, Ms. Lewinsky was offered a job working for Ambassador Bill Richardson at the U.N. Ms. Tripp found in this offer a new source of outrage. The offer came “too fast,” “so they won’t have to—so they will consider it settled.” It had Ms. Lewinsky “railroaded,” “backed into a corner” as to whether she wanted to take it or not. Ms. Lewinsky turned the job down. At this point, no matter what the president or Ms. Currie said or did, it became a fresh source of grievance and invective. Ms. Tripp encouraged Ms. Lewinsky to believe the White House did not appreciate how little trouble Ms. Lewinsky had been.

MS. TRIPP: That you’re the farthest thing from trouble he’s ever had. . . . I feel very strongly that he should be thanking his lucky stars, left, right, and center, that you are who you are. . . . Most people going through what you’ve gone through would have said hey, [expletive] you and the horse you rode in on and let me call the National Enquirer.

MS. LEWINSKY: Yeah.

In December 1997, Ms. Tripp says, she became aware that surreptitiously taping phone conversations was illegal in the state of Maryland, and that, far from being protected by this “insurance policy,” this evidence of her truthfulness and integrity, she might actually go to jail. She contacted Ms. Goldberg, who began calling lawyers she knew, at the Chicago branch of Kirkland & Ellis (where Mr. Starr still worked at the time), and at other firms, in Chicago, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, about making contact on her behalf with the Office of the Independent Counsel to obtain immunity for her illegal taping. It is not clear why Ms. Tripp needed an intermediary to make contact with Mr. Starr’s office, since—as we know, but the grand jury and readers of Mr. Starr’s report do not—Ms. Tripp had been in touch with the independent counsel for at least three years.

Ms. Tripp and the independent counsel’s office claim that she came to them for the first time on Monday, January 12, 1998, the day before their agents and the F.B.I. equipped her with a body wire for a last conversation with Ms. Lewinsky. To do so the independent counsel needed authorization, on an “emergency basis,” from Attorney General Janet Reno or the three-judge special division of the U.S. Court of Appeals. They needed a legal basis for drawing Monica Lewinsky into their investigation. If Ms. Tripp could elicit from Ms. Lewinsky some evidence of a conspiracy to break the law, some evidence, for example, that the president had authorized Vernon Jordan to find a job for Ms. Lewinsky as a bribe for her to commit perjury, Mr. Starr would have some sort of argument for the expansion of his jurisdiction. He could make Ms. Lewinsky herself an agent for the independent counsel’s office. But the deadlines were tight. The president was due to testify in the Jones case on January 17. So Starr wired Ms. Tripp before he had any authorization from the attorney general or the appellate court to do so. He had to hope that the evidence Ms. Tripp would elicit, and tape with her body wire, would override this procedural concern.

Here was the situation in the independent counsel’s office by the time they came to Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Starr had recruited lawyers with experience prosecuting organized crime. Since the days of Robert Kennedy, the custom in organized-crime cases has been to get the suspects, violate their rights, and if you cannot convict them of one crime then somehow indict them for another. From the day in 1994 when Judge Starr offered to write an amicus brief in the Paula Jones case—moreover, through the years when, as special counsel, he maintained his lucrative private practice at Kirkland & Ellis—it was clear that he was by no means remarkable for scruple and in no sense averse to conflicts of interest of the most glaring kind. Nothing could be more obvious than his emotional, ideological, even social and professional, links to the old case of Paula Jones. By the 1996 election, he must have been frustrated and humiliated. None of his expensive lines of inquiry had worked out—not the suicide of Vincent Foster, not Travel-gate or Filegate, certainly not Whitewater. Susan McDougal, after more than a year in jail for contempt, was still of no use to him. Webster Hubbell, whom he had sent to jail but given a limited grant of immunity in exchange for his testimony, had not really helped him, either. Vernon Jordan, who found money and jobs for Hubbell, was thriving alongside the newly re-elected president. The prosecutor had spent millions so far, and he had failed. He would obviously like to find that constellation—a crime committed by a subordinate of the president’s—somewhere, before the expiration of the president’s term.

The love life of Monica Lewinsky seems an odd place to look for that configuration. Yet, with a little prosecutorial zeal and creativity, it might be found. Mr. Starr’s documents have vestiges of an attempt to show that it is there. Another case of the jurors pursuing a line of inquiry in spite of the best efforts of the prosecutors occurs near the end of the testimony of Monica Lewinsky. The jurors want to know about her first encounter with the prosecutors from the Office of the Independent Counsel, on January 16, 1998, when Linda Tripp lured her into the midst of the prosecutors and F.B.I. agents, who would detain her for most of the day and night.

“Maybe if I could ask, what areas do you want to get into?” Mr. Emmick asks a grand juror. “Because there’s—you know—many hours of activity.” A few lines later:

A JUROR: We want to know about that day.

A JUROR: That day.

A JUROR: The first question.

A JUROR: Yes.

A JUROR: We really want to know about that day.

MR. EMMICK: All right.

The jurors are right to insist on a description of the day. That was the day—and the night—when the prosecutors came as close as they have so far to bringing the entire constitutional system down.

Ms. Lewinsky starts to tell about that day: Ms. Lewinsky and Ms. Tripp had arranged to meet at the food court of the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City mall.

THE WITNESS: She was late. I saw her come down the escalator. And as I—as I walked toward her, she kind of motioned behind her and Agent [blank] and Agent [blank] presented themselves to me. . . . They told me . . . that they wanted to talk to me and give me a chance, I think, to cooperate, maybe. I—to help myself. I told them I wasn’t speaking to them without my attorney.

This is the turning point. This is the moment when the investigation begins to reveal itself as what it truly is. There is absolutely no doubt, none whatsoever, that the investigators—prosecutors and F.B.I. agents alike—were obliged by law to stop right there, without another word, until Ms. Lewinsky brought in her attorney. Indeed, they were required, under Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, to have contacted her attorney in the first place. They continued.

THE WITNESS: They told me . . . I should know I won’t be given as much information and won’t be able to help myself as much with my attorney there. So I agreed to go. I was so scared. (The witness begins crying.)

Two questions later, she turns to the lead attorney at this grand-jury hearing, Michael Emmick:

THE WITNESS: Can Karin [Immergut] do the questioning now? This is—can I ask you to step out?

MR. EMMICK: Sure. Okay. All right. . . .

MS. IMMERGUT:

Q. Okay. Did you go to a room with them at the hotel?

A. Yes.

Q. And what did you do then? Did you ever tell them that you wanted to call your mother?

A. I told them I wanted to talk to my attorney. . . . And they told me—Mike [Emmick] came out and introduced himself to me and told me that—that Janet Reno had sanctioned Ken Starr to investigate my actions in the Paula Jones case, that they—that they knew I had signed a false affidavit, they had me on tape saying I had committed perjury, that they were going to—that I could go to jail for 27 years, they were going to charge me with perjury and obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and witness tampering and something else.

Q. And you’re saying “they,” at that point, who was talking to you about that stuff?

A. Mike Emmick and the two FBI guys. . . . And I just—I felt so bad.

This is an extraordinary scene. Monica Lewinsky, who had faced questioning about her most intimate experiences, has quietly drawn the line. She asks Michael Emmick, one of the participants in the events of “that day,” to leave the room. This is a side of Monica Lewinsky which has not appeared before.

Q. I guess later, just to sort of finish up, I guess . . . was there a time then that you were—you just waited with the prosecutors until your mother came down?

A. No.

Q. Okay.

A. I mean, there was, but they—they told me they wanted me to cooperate. I asked them what cooperating meant, it entailed, and they told me . . . that they had had me on tape saying things from the lunch that I had had with Linda at the Ritz-Carlton . . . then they told me that I—that I’d have to agree to be debriefed and that I’d have to place calls or wear a wire to see—to call Betty and Mr. Jordan and possibly the President. . . .

Q. And did you tell them that you didn’t want to do that?

A. Yes. . . . Then I wanted to call my mom and they kept telling me . . . that I couldn’t tell anybody about this, they didn’t want anyone to find out and . . . that was the reason I couldn’t call Mr. Carter, was because they were afraid that he might tell the person who took me to Mr. Carter.

The person who took her to Mr. Carter was Vernon Jordan.

So obsessed are the prosecutors with the prospect of getting the president and Vernon Jordan, or rather the president through Vernon Jordan, that they fear that any attorney she might select would alert Mr. Jordan. They actually propose to Ms. Lewinsky that she call an attorney they have chosen.

A. They told me that I could call this number and get another criminal attorney, but I didn’t want that and I didn’t trust them. Then I just cried for a long time. . . . They just sat there and then . . . they kept saying there was this time constraint, there was a time constraint. I had to make a decision.

And then, Bruce Udolf [another prosecutor] came in at some point and then—then Jackie Bennett [yet another prosecutor] came in . . . and the room was crowded and he was saying to me, you know, you have to make a decision. I had wanted to call my mom, they weren’t going to let me call my attorney, so I just—I wanted to call my mom and they . . . And they had told me before that I could leave whenever I wanted, but . . . I didn’t really know. . . . I mean I thought if I left then that they were just going to arrest me.

As all the F.B.I. agents and prosecutors from the special counsel’s office gathered in that crowded room had every reason to know, they were in flagrant violation of Ms. Lewinsky’s rights—and, not incidentally, their own oaths of office.

A. And so then they told me that I should know that they were planning to prosecute my mom for the things that I had said that she had done.

(The witness begins crying.)

A JUROR: So if I understand it, you first met the agents, Agents [blank] and [blank], at around 1:00 and it wasn’t until about 11 p.m. that you had an opportunity to talk to a lawyer?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

Ms. Immergut now makes a small attempt to redeem the reputation of her colleagues:

Q. Although you were allowed to—the thing with Frank Carter was that they were afraid he would tell Vernon Jordan? Is that what they expressed to you?

A. Right. And I had—I had—I think that someone said that Frank was a civil attorney and so that he really couldn’t help me anyway. So I asked him if at least I could call and ask him for a recommendation for a criminal attorney and they didn’t think that was a good idea. . . .

A JUROR: Sounds as though they were actively discouraging you from talking to an attorney.

THE WITNESS: Yes.

Ms. Immergut tries again, with what is in no sense a question:

Q. Well, from Frank Carter.

A. From Frank Carter, who was my only attorney at that point.

MS. IMMERGUT: Right. Right.

THE WITNESS: So I could have called any other attorney but—

A JUROR: You didn’t have another attorney.

THE WITNESS: I didn’t have another attorney and this was my attorney for this case, so, I mean, this was—

A JUROR: And this is the attorney who had helped you with the affidavit.

THE WITNESS: Yes. And that—the affidavit—well, the affidavit wasn’t even filed yet. It was Fed Ex’d out on that day.

This is an altogether remarkable revelation. For all the prosecutors’ talk of “time constraint . . . time constraint” and pressure, brought by a squad of no fewer than three prosecutors and two agents of the F.B.I. on Ms. Lewinsky to “make a decision,” the entire apparatus of the independent counsel’s office, with prosecutors and F.B.I. agents, its four-year, $40 million investigation, was now focused on this young woman, when her affidavit had not yet even been filed. It was Friday. The following Monday was a federal holiday. For all they knew, in spite of anything she had said to Ms. Tripp on any tape (and, as it turned out, she had lied to Ms. Tripp on several matters crucial to the case), she might have changed her mind and filed a truthful affidavit.

On Thursday, right after their taping, the special prosecutor’s office had applied on an “emergency basis” to the attorney general, Janet Reno, and to the three-judge appellate court panel to extend the prosecutors’ jurisdiction to the Jones case and to Ms. Lewinsky. All they had, at this point, was the suggestion on Ms. Tripp’s tapes that Vernon Jordan might have asked Ms. Lewinsky to lie on her Paula Jones affidavit in exchange for a job. It is hard to see how, without deceiving Ms. Reno or the judges, the special prosecutor could justify his claim. Ms. Tripp, not the president, had come up with the idea of enlisting Mr. Jordan in the job hunt. Ms. Lewinsky had in fact signed her affidavit before she was offered a job she found acceptable (at Revlon).

It is hard in any case to see how the possibility that someone will commit perjury can constitute an “emergency.” The lie, after all, remains in the record, will last and be detected in due course. (A border crossing with drugs, on the other hand, or a conspiracy to murder, might require emergency jurisdiction in that the evidence may vanish, or irreversible damage may be done.) But it is the height of absurdity to claim an emergency in the loss of an opportunity to catch someone in a lie that has not yet occurred. What seems obvious is that the prosecutors must have known even then that the Tripp tapes really proved no crime. Their hope had to be that wiring Ms. Lewinsky in conversation with Vernon Jordan and the president himself might provide evidence of something else—a real obstruction of justice, say, or, better yet, evidence of some Whitewater-or Hubbell-related crime. Ms. Lewinsky refused to be wired.

A JUROR: During this time in the hotel with them, did you feel threatened?

A. Yes.

JUROR: Did you feel that they had set a trap?

THE WITNESS: I—I—I did and I had—I didn’t understand . . . why they had to trap me into coming there. . . . I mean this had all been a set-up and that’s why I mean that was just so frightening. It was so incredibly frightening. . . . They told me if I partially cooperate, they’ll talk to the judge. . . .

Q. So you didn’t know what would happen if you left.

A. No.

It is all very well to say that Ms. Lewinsky is being overly dramatic; that she survived, regardless; that she did not collaborate in the prosecutors’ efforts to make her, like Ms. Tripp, their agent; and that she suffered no adverse consequences. But it is not true.

Quite apart from her 11-hour ordeal, the interrogation was not without adverse consequences for Ms. Lewinsky. That night, when her mother, Marcia Lewis, arrived by train from New York, one of the prosecutors took Ms. Lewis aside and conferred with her alone. Later, in a phone call (made at Ms. Lewis’s insistence) with Ms. Lewinsky’s father, in California, the prosecutor said that the matter was “time sensitive.” It may be that any family, under these conditions—in which the prosecutors made so clear their aversion to their daughter’s attorney—would have thought it wise to fire that attorney. It may be that Ms. Lewinsky’s parents thought things would go better for their daughter with another lawyer; certainly the prosecutors in their time alone with Ms. Lewinsky’s mother had ample opportunity to tell her so. And, in fact, that night the Lewinskys decided to fire Francis Carter and hired William Ginsburg—a California attorney specializing in cases of medical malpractice. Whatever else might be said about Mr. Ginsburg, he was not likely to strike fear into the hearts of the prosecutors or to be in any way connected with Vernon Jordan. He was not an expert in constitutional or criminal law, and he did not move to have the case against Ms. Lewinsky thrown out on grounds of prosecutorial abuses. If Ms. Lewinsky had had a constitutional lawyer the case against her would have been thrown out.

Later, the Lewinskys may have thought that, to avoid further, long and expensive litigation, they needed Beltway attorneys more acceptable still to the forces arrayed against them. Plato Cacheris and Jacob Stein, respected though they are, are also not without political affiliation. (Cacheris’s most famous client, at the time of Watergate, was former attorney general John Mitchell. Stein was the independent counsel who in 1984 exonerated Reagan aide Edwin Meese III.) Ms. Lewinsky would almost certainly have been better off with her original attorney, Francis Carter.

To return to the case. Having failed to wire Ms. Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr is eager to supply his colleagues in the Jones case with information to formulate questions for which the president will be unprepared, and on which it is virtually impossible for the president, or any other person, to be entirely truthful, not just for the obvious reasons—discretion, family, a reluctance to injure—but because such a line of inquiry never ends. The many people—journalists, government officials—who have expressed their belief that the whole matter would have gone away if only the president had, from the outset, “looked people in the eye and told the truth” seem not to have considered where that sort of testimony would lead. Even in Mr. Starr’s documents, the counsel presses on and on, to elicit testimony about “masturbating,” for example—which could have no possible relevance in the case. There is the threat of perjury lurking behind every such expression of the prosecutor’s salacious appetite. In fact, the volumes the special counsel has submitted to Congress show precisely how detailed, ugly, preposterous, ultimately endless, and unconscionable such questions are.

Since the chronology does not support Mr. Starr, the volumes contain no chronology. Since so much of the “evidence” is irrelevant, or contrived, or contradicted, or suspect in other ways, the report simply buries it in disorganization and sheer mass.

It does not take a high level of acuity to see that there is something anomalous about this list. It could be just a result of the order of transcription that Tapes 1 and 2 follow 18 and 19, and so on. Ms. Tripp testifies at length, however, that she had only one tape recorder and that she did not label tapes by date. As soon as each tape was full, or even before it was full, Ms. Tripp says, she put it in a Spode china bowl at some distance from her tape recorder; she was so anxious not to erase or alter anything that she used tapes one after another, never more than once, and often did not even risk turning a tape over to side B.

There seems no plausible explanation, then, for the fact that Tape 16 is said to hold the conversations of November 8, 11, 13, 14, and 16, while Tape 26 contains conversations of November 11. November 11 falls inescapably between November 8 and November 13. Ms. Tripp would have had to remove Tape 16 after she had recorded the conversations of November 8 and 11, used Tape 26 to record more conversations on November 11, and then put in Tape 16 again to record November 13, 14, and 16—not quite the process she describes.

An F.B.I. report, moreover, states that the taping was sometimes affected by “Tripp’s cats” having “activated the pause button.” Riveting as some of the recorded conversations are, it seems hard to justify a great reliance on them.

In the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover and his F.B.I. clandestinely made tapes of Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in various sexual acts in hotel bedrooms. The bureau sent copies of those tapes to several public officials and members of the press, and to Dr. King himself, in order to humiliate him and either drive him to suicide or hound him into retirement. Judge Starr and his staff, in their failure to make a legal case, have resorted in the end to the same strategy. One difference is that their target is the president. Another is that in the 1960s public officials and the press refused to disseminate such tapes. In the late 90s the press welcomes, broadcasts, and dwells upon them; the House rushes to publish them, with the congressional imprimatur, and to use them as the basis for an impeachment inquiry.

Even in his worst excesses, Senator Joseph McCarthy made at least the claim of constitutional issues: the alleged infiltration and subversion of the American government by a foreign power. In the Nixonian crisis of Watergate, the issue was also constitutional: abuse of power by the president in his official capacity. In 1974 the House Judiciary Committee specifically rejected as an impeachable offense Nixon’s cheating (and thereby lying under oath about it), in his private capacity, on his income taxes.

It is not often remarked that the Constitution protects not against the crimes of people against one another, but against abuses by the state itself against its citizens. On January 16, 1998—and before and after—Kenneth Starr and his staff became precisely the governmental agents the Constitution guards against.

There is no question that the president was also very much at fault here: failures of judgment, failures of honor, failures of taste. It may be that each of us knows a Monica Lewinsky. Not every temperament finds it easy to escape from her. But Ms. Lewinsky, even if she turns out to have endearing qualities, is an extreme example. In his political life, the president has evidently found it easy to rebuff, even leave, people when he feels he needs to. Somehow, even when Ms. Lewinsky was at her worst—months after he had terminated any physical relations with her, when she would page Ms. Currie, late into the night, with threats and abuse, when she would appear at the White House gate and “scream” until somebody (usually Ms. Currie) came and brought her in—he could not seem to say, or enforce, a decisive No. He seemed to have the same difficulty with the special prosecutor and the grand jury. To have a White House, moreover, that cannot control its interns, pantry stewards, guards—cannot control even access to the president’s person and his time—is a security risk and an administrative disaster. It seems, on the basis of these volumes, that the president is somehow very nearly friendless and that, with very few exceptions, there is something less than first-rate about the people with whom he surrounds himself.

The separation of powers requires the president to insist that the only court before which he will appear is the House in a matter of impeachment. Let the independent counsel come in waving stained dresses as he likes, he has no authority whatever to summon the president or to take a sample of his DNA. The House would look pretty silly deliberating over stains on dresses. In a proceeding of this constitutional order, the president cannot prevail with charm, semantics, or persuasion. To any court other than the House in an impeachment inquiry, he must say, as he should have said to Ms. Lewinsky, simply: No.

The grand jurors, in spite of the evident reluctance of the prosecutors, were able to elicit testimony—to name but one example—from Linda Tripp which the House needs to examine. In reply to the crucial question of why she taped, she answers, at first, relatively calmly, because she was “afraid,” because she needed “protection” against the enormous forces that were trying to “destroy her,” to push her, in spite of her integrity, into a “felony” and a “perjury trap.” A few questions more and she is talking about “the high level of drug use that was rampant in the White House when I was there,” which may extend to the president himself, and testifying that there was a “list of 40 bodies or something that were associated with the Clinton administration. At that time, I didn’t know what that meant. I have since come to see such a list.” The House needs to evaluate for itself the testimony of such a witness, along with the wisdom and good faith of an independent counsel who would reduce that testimony nearly to the size of a microdot, and not publish it earlier than page 4277 of the fifth volume of his text.

The more closely one looks, then, at this huge mass of unsorted, often irrelevant and repellent matter, the clearer it becomes that the intent is to confuse, obscure, and intimidate. The facts the prosecutors were hoping to find—a bribe or other financial inducement to a witness to commit perjury, or at least to remain silent about some underlying crime—did not exist. In the case of Ms. Lewinsky, there was no obstruction of justice. In fact, there was no underlying crime. So they tried to create one. They thought they needed perjury from the president, so they set out to make sure he would commit it. They sent their agent Ms. Tripp to brief lawyers in a civil case with the sort of damaging information that would make it virtually impossible for the president to answer truthfully. Even with untruthful answers (which were peculiarly clumsy and inept), they had no crime—still less, a constitutional high crime or misdemeanor. So they just amassed their sludge and hurled it at the president, and hoped to prevail through embarrassment and disgust.

In one respect, the strategy seems to derive not just from Mr. Starr’s staff of lawyers schooled in the prosecution of organized crime, but also from Mr. Starr’s own experience in the field of anti-trust litigation. In the 1970s, it became common for huge corporations in anti-trust cases simply to overwhelm the opposition with a huge amount of material, in the discovery phase of the trial, in hopes that the opposition could not find its case. The sheer mass of Mr. Starr’s volumes goes even further. It nearly conceals that he unleashed not just the legal mechanism entrusted to him but also a process that violates the ethical and legal norms of the society, on the basis of the (unconvincing, often even internally inconsistent) testimony of one embittered and compromised informant, and one unusually persistent, and demonstrably unreliable, woman of 24.

Mr. Starr likes to dwell, with the press, on his reading of the Bible. There is in the Bible, after all, just one commandment that squarely meets the case as it now stands. It has to do with False Witness, and the false witness in question is not perjury. It is False Witness against Thy Neighbor, and these documents, this compendium of partially false and almost entirely scurrilous testimony, with its accompanying report, is a case of false witness so egregious as to set a standard for the millennium.